A victory for voting integrity

A ruling by a Vermont Superior Court judge has led to the removal of 13 percent of a small Northeast Kingdom town’s electorate from the voter checklist, a win for plaintiffs who argued that part-time residents are not allowed to vote in Vermont elections.

The decision handed down last week by Judge Thomas J. Devine clears the way for a legal vote in Victory, Vt., on Town Meeting Day in March. It also helps clarify the legal definition of a Vermont resident for voting purposes.

Attorney Deborah Bucknam, and her client Tracey Martel, alleged in a March 21, 2017, complaint and mandamus petition that Victory’s voter checklist contained unqualified voters and non-residents, 11 of whom cast absentee ballots in last year’s Town Meeting Day. The complaint further stated that multiple non-residents were illegally added to the voter checklist, in violation of a constitutional mandate that elections be “free and without corruption.”

Selectboard member Tracey Martel ran unsuccessfully for the Victory town clerk and treasurer positions on Town Meeting Day last year, losing both races to current Town Clerk Carol Easter by less than four votes.

As of last March, Victory had 84 registered voters on the town voter checklist. Of that number, 76 votes were cast on Town Meeting Day 2017 — 41 by absentee ballot and 35 in person. However, Victory has only 63 residents, according to the 2010 Census, meaning the numbers simply didn’t add up.

The judge gave the OK for the town to move ahead with election preparations, provided the checklist is cleaned up.

Among the outcomes of the judge’s decision is that just because a person owns property in a Vermont town, it does not mean that the person has established residency in the state.

“(State) Title 17 defines ‘resident’ to mean ‘a natural person who is domiciled in this state as evidenced by an intent to maintain a principal dwelling place in the state indefinitely and to return there if temporarily absent, coupled with an act or acts consistent with that intent,’” Devine wrote in his decision.

“Just think about it: There were 84 registered voters on the Victory voter checklist when Tracey Martel and I filed this suit a year ago. Today 11 were taken off the checklist, so that’s 13 percent of the electorate. That’s got to be a record here in Vermont. All of the voters that we complained against are off the checklist,” Bucknam said.

Martel stressed that voter suppression can happen in many ways, including the way it happened in little Victory.

“I’m not the least bit bitter about this,” she told this editor, “I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from other town (officials).

“We’re not the only town with these kinds of problems. The lesson here is that having non-residents vote in an election is really just another kind of voter suppression; it negatively affects the legal residents living here. So this is the year for cleaning up.”

Let’s hope there’s more effort made by citizens, elected officials, and the courts to help banish illegal voting in Vermont and elsewhere once and for all.